Re: [PATCH] abstract out bits of ldt.c

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

"Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@mbligh.org> wrote:
>
> 
> 
> --Chris Wright <chrisw@osdl.org> wrote (on Sunday, August 07, 2005 16:44:11 -0700):
> 
> > * Martin J. Bligh (mbligh@mbligh.org) wrote:
> >> Starting on the work to merge xen cleanly as a subarch.
> >> Introduce make_pages_readonly and make_pages_writable where appropriate 
> >> for Xen, defined as a no-op on other subarches. Same for 
> > 
> > Maybe this is a bad name, since make_pages_readonly/writable has
> > intutitive meaning, and then is non-inutitively a no-op (for default).
> 
> You're welcome to suggest something else if you want, though it would
> have been easier if you'd done it the first time you saw this patch,
> not now. Going through this stuff multiple times is going to get very
> boring very fast.
> 
> xen_make_pages_readonly / xen_make_pages_writable ?
> 

Well we don't want to assume "xen" at this stage.  We're faced with a
choice at present: to make the linux->hypervisor interface be some
xen-specific and xen-controlled thing, or to make it a more formal and
controlled kernel interface which talks to a generic hypervisor rather than
assuming it's Xen down there.

As long as it doesn't hamper performance or general code sanity, I think it
would be better to make this a well-defined and controlled Linux interface.
Some of the code to do that is starting to accumulate in -mm.  Everyone
needs to sit down, take a look at the patches and the proposal and work out
if this is the way to proceed.